Electronic calendar systems allow a user, for instance, referred to as a meeting leader to schedule a meeting between multiple participants and to reserve the required resources for the meeting. When the meeting takes place between people from separate locations (such as between people in different countries), the leader can usually schedule resources at his or her site or location but may not be able to schedule the resources at other sites or locations outside his or her site. Examples of resources include conference rooms and display equipment. Even if the leader can schedule resources at other sites, the complexity of scheduling grows with the number of locations.
For example, current calendar systems or applications do not allow participants from other sites to add resources to the existing entry corresponding to the meeting. An alternative is to have the people at other sites, if they want to add resources to this entry, to create a duplicate calendar entry and add resources at their site. However, any changes to the original calendar entry made by the leader are not visible in the duplicate entry without manual intervention by the creator of the second entry. Therefore, this method suffers from several synchronization problems.